Presented by: Texas Precious Metals

Although gold has a bigger reputation today as a monetary metal, it was often deemed too valuable for everyday transactions throughout history.

For the most part, common people in places like Ancient Rome used silver to buy daily staples like grain or wine. As a result, silver has a strong reputation through monetary history as the “people’s money”.

Even today, silver is still much more widely accessible. With one ounce of gold being 70x more expensive than an ounce of silver, it’s difficult for someone who is just starting to accumulate wealth to own gold.

Visualizing Silver

What do savings and debt look like, using the “people’s money”?

Below is everything from the average paycheck to global sovereign debt visualized as silver cubes.

1. A median U.S. family brings in $2,355 per pay period (semi-monthly) pre-tax.

Average U.S. Paycheck as a Silver Cube

2. However, the median American family only has about $5,000 of savings.

Median U.S. Savings as a Silver Cube

3. The standard silver delivery bar holds 1,000 oz of silver.

Silver bar

4. Average household debt is $98,312, with mortgage debt being the primary component.

Average household debt as a silver cube

5. A Lamborghini worth over $400,000 needs a silver cube with 16-inch (0.4m) sides.

A Lamborghini's value as a silver cube

6. Using a silver price of about $18/oz, here’s what $1 million looks like.

$1 million as a silver cube

7. Every day, the world’s mines produce about 75 tonnes of silver, worth over $44 million.

Daily Silver Production as a silver cube

8. Silver Eagle sales have jumped considerably since the Financial Crisis.

Silver Eagle Sales as a Silver Cube

9. When the Hunt Brothers tried to corner the silver market, they hoarded 200 million oz.

Hunt Brothers Stockpile as a Silver Cube

10. Today, almost 900 million oz of silver is mined each year.

All Silver Mined Each Year as a Silver Cube

11. JP Morgan’s market capitalization, in comparison to previous cubes.

JPMorgan's market capitalization as a silver cube

12. All silver ever mined would not compare to the Fed’s balance sheet, which is now $4.5 trillion.

All Global Debt Visualized as a Gold Cube

13. Global sovereign debt is 13X bigger than all previous cubes combined.

All Sovereign Debt Visualized as a Gold Cube

Liked our visualizations of silver cubes?

Don’t forget to check out 11 stunning visualizations of gold.

The Money Project is an ongoing collaboration between Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals that seeks to use intuitive visualizations to explore the origins, nature, and use of money.

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Presented by: Texas Precious Metals

Chart: Deaths of Roman Emperors vs. Coinage Debasement

Chart: Deaths of Roman Emperors vs. Coinage Debasement

The Money Project is an ongoing collaboration between Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals that seeks to use intuitive visualizations to explore the origins, nature, and use of money.

Correlation does not necessarily imply causation.

In other words, just because two sets of data may follow a similar pattern, it does not mean there is any direct causal relationship.

However, as we were assembling our previous research on Currency and the Collapse of the Roman Empire, we noticed something that was too uncanny to skip past: during the 113-year stretch of time from 192 to 305 AD, an astonishing amount of Roman emperors (84%) were either brutally murdered or assassinated.

This, of course, was a particularly troubled period for the Romans. During the Crisis of the Third Century (235 to 284 AD) specifically, the combined pressures of invasion, civil war, plague, and economic depression threatened to bring down the Empire.

Coincidentally, during this same time frame, the silver denarius went from having 2.7 grams silver to being “silver” in name only. Base metals such as bronze and copper were added to the silver coins to debase the currency, and by the year 300 AD, a silver denarius (or its equivalent) had only a trace of silver left.

Notes on the Data

Data on Roman Emperor deaths is from this resource, and the debasement of silver coinage was previously covered by Armstrong Economics.

Roman Emperor deaths or abdications included in the visualization are ones that occurred between the birth of the Empire (27 BC) to the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 AD). It’s also worth noting that, according to the source, there is a significant amount of emperors who had fates that are unclear or died under mysterious circumstances, and therefore the list may not be entirely accurate.

About the Money Project

The Money Project aims to use intuitive visualizations to explore ideas around the very concept of money itself. Founded in 2015 by Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals, the Money Project will look at the evolving nature of money, and will try to answer the difficult questions that prevent us from truly understanding the role that money plays in finance, investments, and accumulating wealth.

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Also From The Money Project:

Currency and the Collapse of the Roman Empire

The World's Most Famous Case of Hyperinflation

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It's Official: Bitcoin was the Top Performing Currency of 2015

It’s Official: Bitcoin was the Top Performing Currency of 2015

The Money Project is an ongoing collaboration between Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals that seeks to use intuitive visualizations to explore the origins, nature, and use of money.

For most investors, the major story of 2015 was the expectation and eventual fulfillment of a rate hike, signalling the start of tightening monetary policy in the United States. This policy is divergent to those of other major central banks, and this has translated into considerable strength and momentum for the U.S. dollar.

Using the benchmark of the U.S. Dollar Index, a comparison against a basket of major currencies, the dollar gained 8.3% throughout the year.

Despite this strength, the best performing currency in 2015 was not the dollar. In fact, the top currency of 2015 is likely to be considered the furthest thing from the greenback.

Bitcoin, a digital and decentralized cryptocurrency, staged a late comeback in 2015 to overtake the dollar by a whopping 35% by the end of the year.

Bitcoin is no stranger to extremes. During the year it came into the mainstream in 2013, Bitcoin gained 5,429% to easily surpass all other currencies in gains. However, the following year it would become a dog, losing -56% of its value to become the world’s worst performing currency in 2014.

The second best performing major currency, relative to the USD, was the Israeli shekel. It gained 0.3% throughout the year, and the Japanese yen (0%) and Swiss franc (0%) were close behind, finishing on par with how they started the year.

The world’s worst performing currencies are from countries that were battered by commodities or geopolitical strife.

Ukraine’s hryvnia fell -33.8% in the aftermath of Crimea. Brazil’s real (-30.5%), the Canadian dollar (-15.9%), Russian ruble (-20.8%), and South African rand (-26.7%) all lost significant value in the purging of global commodities. Gold finished the year down -10%, and silver at -11%.

About the Money Project

The Money Project aims to use intuitive visualizations to explore ideas around the very concept of money itself. Founded in 2015 by Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals, the Money Project will look at the evolving nature of money, and will try to answer the difficult questions that prevent us from truly understanding the role that money plays in finance, investments, and accumulating wealth.

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All of the World's Money and Markets in One Visualization

All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization

How much money exists in the world?

Strangely enough, there are multiple answers to this question, and the amount of money that exists changes depending on how we define it. The more abstract definition of money we use, the higher the number is.

In this data visualization of the world’s total money supply, we wanted to not only compare the different definitions of money, but to also show powerful context for this information. That’s why we’ve also added in recognizable benchmarks such as the wealth of the richest people in the world, the market capitalizations of the largest publicly-traded companies, the value of all stock markets, and the total of all global debt.

The end result is a hierarchy of information that ranges from some of the smallest markets (Bitcoin = $5 billion, Silver above-ground stock = $14 billion) to the world’s largest markets (Derivatives on a notional contract basis = somewhere in the range of $630 trillion to $1.2 quadrillion).

In between those benchmarks is the total of the world’s money, depending on how it is defined. This includes the global supply of all coinage and banknotes ($5 trillion), the above-ground gold supply ($7.8 trillion), the narrow money supply ($28.6 trillion), and the broad money supply ($80.9 trillion).

All figures are in the equivalent of US dollars.

About the Money Project

The Money Project acknowledges that the very concept of money itself is in flux – and it seeks to answer these questions.

The Money Project aims to use intuitive visualizations to explore ideas around the very concept of money itself. Founded in 2015 by Visual Capitalist and Texas Precious Metals, the Money Project will look at the evolving nature of money, and will try to answer the difficult questions that prevent us from truly understanding the role that money plays in finance, investments, and accumulating wealth.

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